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Who Are You?

By Shlomo Maital

William Revelle, Northwestern University

For years, psychologist William Revelle battled the idea that you can pigeon-hole people into “personality types” or traits. With colleagues, he did a very large study, believing he would find evidence contradicting the five-personality-trait idea. To his surprise, he found the opposite.  

   Martin Gerlach, Beatrice Farb, William Revelle & Luís A. Nunes Amaral   “A robust data-driven approach identifies four personality types across four large data sets”.   Nature –   Human Behaviour (2018)

   Here is a part of the abstract of this article,  published in the leading scientific journal Nature:

   Here we develop an alternative approach to the identification of personality types, which we apply to four large data sets comprising more than 1.5 million participants. We find robust evidence for at least four distinct personality types, extending and refining previously suggested typologies. We show that these types appear as a small subset of a much more numerous set of spurious solutions in typical clustering approaches, highlighting principal limitations in the blind application of unsupervised machine learning methods to the analysis of big data.  

And – here are the four types.

 Average

Average people are high in neuroticism and extraversion, while low in openness. This is the most common personality type.

Reserved

The Reserved type is emotionally stable but not open or neurotic. They are not particularly extraverted but are somewhat agreeable and conscientious.

 Role models

Role models score low in neuroticism and high in all the other traits. They are good leaders, dependable and open to new ideas.

Self-centered

Self-Centered people score very high in extraversion and below average in openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

   Hand on your heart – which are you?   Or do you think this is just spurious research?